Ukraine’s War: Let’s Hope Trump Wins

My latest on American Thinker.

In short, the scenario is that of a Western world in the grip of a strange obsession arising from a misunderstanding, whereby we are confronted with the possibility of WW III without there being any good reason for it.

When three weeks ago French President Emmanuel Macron said he refused to rule out sending ground troops to Ukraine, his words stood in stark contrast to both the European and American “red line” when it comes to putting boots on the ground in that country. As a matter of fact, several NATO countries, including the U.S., Germany and the UK, were quick to rule out that hypothesis. The "path to victory" is providing military aid "so Ukrainian troops have the weapons and ammunition they need to defend themselves," a White House statement said. Analogously, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesman, and the office of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni reiterated the agreed commitment to supporting Ukraine without including the presence of troops from European or NATO states on Ukrainian territory.

Since then things haven’t changed that much, except that the awareness that the risk of plunging the world into the Third World War has increased. This is especially thanks to three factors. The first is the so-called Weimar Triangle. “Today we agreed on a number of priorities, including the immediate procurement of even more weapons for Ukraine on the entire world market,” announced Scholz at the end of a summit meeting, held on March 15, with the French president and the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk referring to the launch of “a coalition of Ukraine’s allies for long-range weapons.”

 The second factor is the insistence with which Macron reiterates his position.  “Maybe at some point -- I don't want it, I won't take the initiative -- we will have to have operations on the ground, whatever they may be, to counter the Russian forces,” the French president told newspaper Le Parisien in an interview on Friday.

The third factor is the myopia with which NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg [...]  

 

Read more: Ukraine’s War: Let’s Hope Trump Wins

Will American Wokeness Destroy the Rest of the West?

It definitely seems that there's a sickness emanating from the United States that seeks to contaminate all of Western civilization. France in particular, believe it or not, is alarmed... 

My latest on American Thinker.

R.I.P. Sir Sean Connery

 

Sean Connery was born into a working-class Edinburgh family. And this, perhaps paradoxically, is the key reason why, at least in my view, he was perfect in the roles of kings (e.g. King Arthur in First Knight and Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), intellectuals (e.g. Brother William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose and Professor Henry Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), “masters & commanders” (e.g. Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez in Highlander and Captain Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October). 

In other words, he was the living proof that true aristocracy, in all of its variants, is exclusively a matter of personality. 

Rest in Peace, Sir Sean.

The European R-Word

The whole matter has developed into a national scandal, to the point that even Italian Bishops Conference (CEI) President Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti felt it necessary to weigh in on this. “We thought talk of (the white) race had been buried for good,” he said after League Lombardy governor candidate Attilio Fontana recently said migrants threatened the white race. To be precise, Fontana said, “We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if it will be wiped out.” Subsequently he said that it had been a “slip of the tongue,” and made it clear that it’s not about being xenophobic or racist, “it’s just about being logical or rational.”

While some on the center-right agreed there was a real risk to Italian society in the numbers of migrants arriving here, the mainstream media and parties condemned the comments. European leaders, in turn, expressed concerns about what they consider an increasingly xenophobic tone of the campaign for the March 4 general election. Even ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose center-right Forza Italia party is the League’s coalition partner for the elections, said Fontana’s comment had been “unfortunate.” But he also said that it would be “a serious mistake to focus too much attention on one wrong word and not on the risk that Europe loses its identity.” On the same wavelength, but even more strongly, League head Matteo Salvini said Italy was “under attack.” “Our culture, our society, our traditions and our way of life are threatened. An invasion is under way,” he said. However, even Matteo Salvini failed to pronounce the word ‘race’. Why? Because in Europe, unlike in the U.S., the word ‘race’ has been banned. Italy is obviously no exception, even though the Constitution itself expressly talks of different ‘races’. In fact, Article 3 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic reads as follows: “All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions.” In other words, according to the fundamental law of the country, different races do exist, but nonetheless, you cannot pronounce the word in question. One of political correctness’s many mysteries.

Now we all know there is a social science bias towards the belief that  the differences between the different races are so minimal that they don’t qualify as a strong enough reason to think that there are actually separate races. Accordingly, there is actually only one human race and that is Homo sapiens, and by consequence the correct term to use is ethnicity... Yet, even though the differences are minor they are real and they do define a person’s race—or ‘ethnicity’, ‘ethnic background’, or whatever you like to call it. Therefore, if the exclusion of ‘race’ as a term means denying the genetic differences between groups of people, there is something deeply wrong with the whole concept. Ask a physician about this, and he/she will tell you that he/she sees the differences between races in how they are affected differently by infectious diseases, genetic diseases and cancer. To be precise, from a physician’s point of view asking a person’s ethnicity is basically a cultural question, asking their race is asking something else. The terms are not interchangeable.

As Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein wrote in an opinion piece in Nature (“Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity,” October 8, 2009),

A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels […]. The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide, that were committed with the support of pseudoscientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.

We believe that this position, although well-intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data.

Somewhere in the Web I also read that the mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good parallel.

It is perfectly correct that the notion of ‘hill’ is ill-defined and vague—what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt from a hill and a hill from a mountain?—but nevertheless denying the reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity. Similarly, the notion of distinct human races—genetic clusters across a wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness—is an obviously useful and correct organizing principle…

Generally speaking, common sense should lead us to think that mentioning and being aware of racial differences is not the same thing as racism . In fact, racism is assuming those differences have an innate value scale attached (one is better than another), it’s “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (Merriam-Webster’s dictionary). But as Voltaire once said, “Common sense is not so common.”

Athens and Jerusalem

View of Jerusalem (Conrad Grünenberg, 1487)

Il fatto è che questa non è una città: questa è la vita di ciascuno di noi, che a volte c’illude e a volte ci fa disperare, a volte ci sembra irreale, a volte inutile. La nostra avventura interiore, il nostro eterno viaggio, la nostra vera crociata, è la conquista di un senso da dare alla vita. Questa è la Gerusalemme della quale abbiamo bisogno, alla quale aspiriamo.
(The fact is that this is not a city—this is everyone’s life. Sometimes she deceives us, and other times she drives us to despair, she seems unreal at times, and at other times useless. It is our inner adventure, our eternal journey, our true crusade, and the achievement of giving life a meaning. This is the Jerusalem we need, the one we dream about.)



~ Franco Cardini, Gerusalemme. Una storia (English translation mine)

The above quote came to mind almost as soon as I started reading a gorgeous article at American Thinker titled “What Has Jerusalem to Do with America?” by Fay Voshell. The article takes its cue from the furor following President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but carefully avoids any excess and tries to keep a high profile.

Since the incipit Voshell captures the attention of the reader by quoting a statement by Tertullian—the founder of Latin Christian literature and one of the most powerful formative influences in Western Christian culture—concerning the importance of Jerusalem as contrasted with the secular city of Athens. He wrote, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? After we become Christians, we have no need of Greek philosophy.” Well, somehow paradoxically Tertullian’s drastic view, his outright hostility toward the entanglement of religion and the world, has largely been adopted by the left and, in general, by those who believe in radical separation of church and state: Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens—or America and the West. They have a substitute, secular vision for the world. This substitute vision, says Voshell, is presently called globalism. And globalism

has a deep interest in supplanting Judaism and Christianity, both of which share the eternal spiritual vision of Jerusalem as the holy city whose foundational principles are critical to any society choosing justice and righteousness above power and might.
The globalist vision is against any particular identification by nation or religion. To acknowledge Jerusalem […] is to ratify the cornerstone beliefs of Western civilization while the real desire is to allow two competitors for a new world vision to advance their dreams of empire. The one is the secularist vision of the E.U. and the United Nations; the other is the vision of a global caliphate.
[…] What is at the heart of the debate over Jerusalem is the spiritual foundations of Western civilization. What is being sought is the extermination of the Judeo-Christian consensus that has animated the West and now increasingly much of the globe, ever more gradually over the last five thousand years. What is being hoped for is the actualization of an alternate vision, be it secular or Islamist, by assimilating or destroying Jerusalem. Opposing visions cannot tolerate the vision of the Holy City.
But the truth is that Jerusalem is like no other city.
She is not like El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold that men vainly sought for attaining wealth and fame. Nor is she the city where the Fountain of Youth was sought that men might live forever. Nor is she like fabled Troy, city of Priam’s treasure and the beauteous Helen, both exquisite but mortal. Nor is she the mythical city of Atlantis, powerful and beautiful but sunk forever into the dark seas.
All of those cities have perished, only to become myths, the legends of which continue to fade.
Jerusalem is the Eternal City allied with eternal truth. No one can take her identity from her, even though once again, as it has for thousands of years, a great Beast slouches toward Bethlehem.
She remains a light to the world—a beacon for the past, for the present and for the future.
Jerusalem is the Shining City on the Hill.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? What else can I say? Amen!

Trump in Warsaw

Warsaw, Krasiński Square, July 6, 2017

“This is the speech Mr. Trump should have given to introduce himself to the world at his Inauguration.” That’s how the Wall Street Journal put it the day after the President of the United States gave his “Remarks to the People of Poland,” as the White House described the speech itself. In truth, the remarks were directed at the people of the world, and offered for the first time, six months into Donald Trump’s first term of office, the core of what could become a governing philosophy, that is, in the WSJ’s own words, “a determined and affirmative defense of the Western tradition” and a far better form of nationalism than that of the inauguration address, a nationalism rooted in values and beliefs such as the rule of law, freedom of expression, religious faith and freedom from oppressive government.

Here are some key-passages from the speech:

Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. (Applause.) If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.

But just as our adversaries and enemies of the past learned here in Poland, we know that these forces, too, are doomed to fail if we want them to fail. And we do, indeed, want them to fail. (Applause.) They are doomed not only because our alliance is strong, our countries are resilient, and our power is unmatched. Through all of that, you have to say everything is true. Our adversaries, however, are doomed because we will never forget who we are. And if we don’t forget who are, we just can't be beaten. Americans will never forget. The nations of Europe will never forget. We are the fastest and the greatest community. There is nothing like our community of nations. The world has never known anything like our community of nations.

We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression. (Applause.)

We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves. (Applause.)

And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

What we have, what we inherited from our -- and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people -- what we've inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.

This great community of nations has something else in common: In every one of them, it is the people, not the powerful, who have always formed the foundation of freedom and the cornerstone of our defense. The people have been that foundation here in Poland -- as they were right here in Warsaw -- and they were the foundation from the very, very beginning in America.

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together, only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values. We did not and we will not. We will never back down. (Applause.)

Maybe the WSJ is right, maybe not. In fact, one could argue that the two forms of nationalism—that of the inauguration speech and that of the “Remarks to the People of Poland”—are somehow two faces of the same coin, but this would lead us too far from the main object of this note.. What is certain, however, is that the speech is one that won’t be easily forgotten, nor should it. And this for a number of reasons, among which is the fact that, unlike at least two of his predecessors in the presidency—Barack Obama and George W. Bush—Donald Trump refused to sell the Americans and their Western allies the false ideology according to which all peoples have the same desires, all cultures are equal, and all faiths teach the same things.

This universalism, which conveys the myth of the portability of America’s political and economic principles, is at the heart of the biggest mistakes in U.S. foreign politics in the Middle East, and one reason why so many Western policy makers and opinion leaders fell head over heels for the Arab Spring. They saw the explosion as basically the result of a political crisis and as provoked by a thirst for political freedom, but the deepest roots of the “revolution” were most likely socioeconomic—let’s not forget that for several decades, the Arab world has had the lowest rates of economic growth of all regions of Asia and Africa and the highest rates of unemployment in the world. And they are not issues that can be settled with a new constitution or a mere change of president. They can only be settled through a radical cultural change, involving social, political, and economic structures. Something premature, to say the least. That’s why things went wrong. Take Egypt for instance: the protest movement was initiated by opposition groups, part of which were very radical, but the lead was soon taken by traditional political forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists.

Unlike George W. Bush and his neocon advisers, and in opposition to Barack Obama’s idealistic rhetoric about foreign politics, Donald Trump argued that what we call Western values, far from being universal, are a centuries-long and uneven process of acculturation and education. “In this context,” as David French puts it in National Review, “Judeo-Christian ideas have a specific value. The family as a core building block of the culture has a specific value. Constitutional governance has a specific value. They are not necessarily interchangeable with Islam, with alternative family arrangements, or with statism. Thus, a call to protect faith, family, and limited government is a call to protect the culture that has birthed freedom at home and abroad.”

The Warsaw speech also finds President Trump on the trail of Joseph Ratzinger and the lecture “On Europe’s Crisis of Culture” the then-Cardinal gave in the convent of Saint Scholastica in Subiaco, Italy, on April 1, 2005, the day before Pope John Paul II died. It was a very strong warning against “the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations.”

By the way, one might ask why the West has turned on itself and seems to be refusing to take even the most rudimentary steps to protect itself against its sworn enemies. Of course there are lots of reasons, not just one: cultural Marxism, ennui, loss of faith in organized religion, the transformation of government schools into babysitting services for subsections of the populace with severe cultural learning disabilities, the marginalization of the very notion of excellence, the mutation of the Left into a suicide cult that wants to take the rest of us with it. This kind of illness being thus indicated, the antidote is also easy to prescribe: the antidote to this, as argued in a July 15, 2016 article by Michael Walsh—the author of The Devil’s Pleasure Palace—is a return to our cultural roots,

including the pre-Christian principles of Aristotle (passed down via St. Thomas Aquinas, among others) and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Those roots are neither race- nor faith-specific and in fact the genius of Western civilization is that its principles—not “conservative” principles but civilizational principles—have proven so successful that they resulted in the United States of America, the very embodiment of those ideas.
Which is, of course, why Islam and its ally of convenience, the Left, hate America so. We and our cultural heritage are the refutation of every satanic principle they hold so vengefully dear.
Western civilization has defended us for centuries. Isn’t it about time we defended it?

That’s exactly what President Trump did with his Warsaw speech.

Of course, Never-Trumpers, Trump-sceptics across Europe, and the Left in general didn’t like a speech in which the words “civilization” and “West” are each repeated 10 times. Sarah Wildman at Vox compared this battle cry—“for family, for freedom, for country, and for God”—to an “alt-right manifesto.” David Smith, Washington correspondent for The Guardian, wrote that the Warsaw speech “will be remembered not for a quotable zinger but for muddled thinking and dark nativism.”

On the other side of the fence, Victor Davis Hanson at National Review praises the speech as an implicit corrective to Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, that is as the antithesis to the fallacious, appeasing lecture Obama preached to the Egyptians on June 4, 2009. Whereas Obama had blamed the West for many of Islam’s dilemmas, he writes, Trump praised the singular history and culture of the West. Whereas Obama listed supposed cultural achievements of Islam, Trump rattled off examples of Western exceptionalism, its culture, values, achievements.. A great article indeed. In Warsaw Trump warned the West that it’s because of our prosperity, technological advancement, and cultural superiority that we are in great peril, amid failed enemies who hate those who are more successful.

In sum, Trump’s anti-Cairo message is that only a disciplined, strong West — confident in its past and sure of its present success — will deter enemies, appeal to neutrals, and keep friends. Trump should not have had a need to deliver such a self-evident but now rare message. That he alone had the courage to state the obvious — and was criticized for doing so — reminds us that the corrective to our Western malady is seen as the problem, not the cure.

But the most moving passages of the address are those which explicitly recall one of the greatest speeches given in Poland in the modern era: it was delivered in Victory Square in the Old City of Warsaw on June 2, 1979 by John Paul II, the Polish pope.

Warsaw,  Victory Square, June 2, 1979 

Europe was still divided between the politically free democracies of Western Europe and the communist bloc. John Paul celebrated Mass. Halfway through, as Peggy Noonan tells the story in her latest column in the Wall Street Journal, the crowd began to chant: “We want God! We want God!” Then the pope asked the crowd: What was the greatest work of God? Man. Who redeemed man? Christ. Therefore, he declared, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude. . . The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man.” The chant turned to thunder: “We want God!” It was the beginning of the end for the communist order in Poland.

And when the day came on June 2nd, 1979, and one million Poles gathered around Victory Square for their very first mass with their Polish Pope, that day, every communist in Warsaw must have known that their oppressive system would soon come crashing down. (Applause.) They must have known it at the exact moment during Pope John Paul II’s sermon when a million Polish men, women, and children suddenly raised their voices in a single prayer. A million Polish people did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: “We Want God.” (Applause.)
In those words, the Polish people recalled the promise of a better future. They found new courage to face down their oppressors, and they found the words to declare that Poland would be Poland once again.
As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.” (Applause.)
Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God. And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live. You stood in solidarity against oppression, against a lawless secret police, against a cruel and wicked system that impoverished your cities and your souls. And you won. Poland prevailed. Poland will always prevail. (Applause.)

What a great premise for an even greater conclusion:

We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it? (Applause.)
[…]
Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield -- it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls. Today, the ties that unite our civilization are no less vital, and demand no less defense, than that bare shred of land on which the hope of Poland once totally rested. Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory.
And today as ever, Poland is in our heart, and its people are in that fight. (Applause.) Just as Poland could not be broken, I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.

A great speech. The gauntlet has been taken up.

P.S. An interesting little fact (or coincidence). From BreitbartNews.com:

President Donald Trump’s first photo-call in Poland after his arrival in Air Force One was with President Andrzej Duda and saw him sat beside an oil painting of a prominent figure in Polish history and folklore — the 17th-century king who kicked Islam out of Central Europe and is remembered as “the Hammer of the Turks”.
Warsaw’s Royal Palace, where the meeting took place — lavishly reconstructed after it was dynamited by Nazi German troops during the Second World War — benefits from a surfeit of grand rooms and hundreds of works of art.
From oils of kings and statesmen by artists such as Rembrandt to impressive murals and sculpture, the Polish authorities had a great deal of choice for where to host the symbolic first meeting of President Trump’s first European visit.
It may be seen as a remarkable coincidence, therefore, that of all the rooms and of all the paintings, they chose to sit President Trump besides a portrait of one of Poland’s best-known warrior kings. King Jan (John) III Sobieski is today remembered and celebrated in Poland, and elsewhere in Central Europe, for his pivotal role at the Battle of Vienna in September 1683.  [By Oliver JJ Lane, July 6, 2017]

A Portrait of King Jan Sobieski III hangs over President Trump’s right shoulder / AP IMAGE

They’re Rugby Boys, Don’t You Know? -- A Review

“The things described here are the grateful response of a Christian who has been rescued from a life of sin and death and reconciled to God for a life of hope and an eternal future in heaven.” That’s what the Author says in the biographical note (“Natalie’s Personal Story”) at the end of her book. In fact, Natalie Vellacott believed God’s promise that, ‘All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved’. And “God, by His grace, planted true faith in my heart and I determined to live a new life before Him,” as she herself recalls a few lines above.

Miss Vellacott, a former English Police Sergeant turned missionary to the Philippines, describes in her book, They’re Rugby Boys, Don’t You Know? how she unexpectedly encountered and fell in love with a group of street teenage boys addicted to what the locals call “rugby”—a solvent used for repairing shoes in the Philippines which also has the effect, if inhaled, to temporarily ease hunger and depression, and is known to be one of the major causes of addiction to teenagers and even children. The book chronicles some of Natalie’s ups and downs, victories and frustrations of dealing with the “rugby boys,” the many mistakes she made and the many lessons she’s learned along the way. To her each one of the boys was worth God’s love and hers as well. “My biggest piece of advice,” she writes, “is ‘start small.’ One of the smallest things we did which had the biggest impact was to learn the names of the boys and to use them. Whoever God calls you to help, I encourage you to treat them as individuals and demonstrate through this that their lives are important. Constantly remind them that it is God who loves them and that this is the reason for your concern. Don’t expect dramatic change straight away, but; be Patient, Persevere, and Pray.”

They’re Rugby Boys is an inspiring read, it’s thought-provoking, emotional, and uplifting. I am very happy to have read it.

This book is not for profit and all royalties will be paid directly to “Olongapo Christian Help and Hope” for the ongoing support of the ministry.

Why the Obama Administration is Wrong About the Embassy Attacks

(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

A few simple, but very appropriate, remarks by Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School:

The White House and diplomats may wish to believe a distasteful, provocative, and inflammatory film motivated the violence in both Egypt and Libya. It is comforting for politicians and officials to ascribe the root cause of Islamist terrorism to grievance because if grievance motivates terror, then resolving the grievance could provide the solution.

Islamist terrorism, however, has far less to do with material grievance than ideology. [...]

Read the rest, it’s worth it.

The Lady: Twenty-one Years After

Aung San Suu Kyi gives her Nobel lecture
DANIEL SANNUM LAUTEN/AFP/Getty Images

“ Often during my days of house arrest it felt as though I were no longer a part of the real world. There was the house which was my world, there was the world of others who also were not free but who were together in prison as a community, and there was the world of the free. Each was a different planet pursuing its own separate course in an indifferent universe. What the Nobel Peace Prize did was to draw me once again into the world of other human beings outside the isolated area in which I lived, to restore a sense of reality to me. This did not happen instantly, of course, but as the days and months went by and news of reactions to the award came over the airwaves, I began to understand the significance of the Nobel Prize. It had made me real once again; it had drawn me back into the wider human community. And what was more important, the Nobel Prize had drawn the attention of the world to the struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma. We were not going to be forgotten.
[...]
We are fortunate to be living in an age when social welfare and humanitarian assistance are recognized not only as desirable but necessary. I am fortunate to be living in an age when the fate of prisoners of conscience anywhere has become the concern of peoples everywhere, an age when democracy and human rights are widely, if not universally, accepted as the birthright of all.”

~ Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize speech in Oslo City Hall, Norway, on Saturday, June 16, 2012 (source: The Washington Post).

Sometimes Good prevails over evil, as also demonstrated by the video below. Today was a great day at Oslo City Hall.

The Failure of Arab Liberals

AP  Photo

Everybody knows what happened soon after the heady first days of the Arab Spring. The first omen of what was to come was when, on February 18, 2011 (the Egyptian revolution’s “Victory Day”), the people filling Tahrir Square looked very different than those that had been seen in that very square at the height of the uprising.

 Sohrab Ahmari in Commentary Magazine:

Islamist activists, with their distinctive Salafi-style beards and stern expressions, were the ones dominating Tahrir, not smartphone-wielding young dissidents in Western outfits. They listened intently as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s beloved televangelist, back in Egypt after years spent in exile, called on Egyptians to “liberate” occupied al-Quds (Arabic for Jerusalem). Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who came to embody the revolution for Western audiences, was barred from addressing the Square that day.

Islamist forces have since scored one triumph after another. In Egypt, the Islamist bloc composed of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi al-Nour party has won overwhelming control of both houses of parliament. The rise of Islamist parties has been accompanied by ever worsening violence against Coptic Christians, assaults on the Israeli embassy, and threats to nullify Anwar Sadat’s peace. In Tunisia, the Brotherhood-linked Ennahda party has won a decisive plurality, a once tolerated gay and lesbian community has come under severe attack, and the country’s robust secularist and feminist traditions have been on the retreat amid growing anti-Western sentiment. In Libya, some rebel forces have traded their NATO flags for al-Qaeda’s black banner; others have targeted the country’s vulnerable black African and Amazigh minorities. Torture is reportedly rampant in the prisons of free Libya.

Clearly something went wrong with the Arab Spring: basically what went wrong was the Arab liberalism, the moral and cultural crisis of which, says Sohrab Ahmari, is serious:

It threatens nothing less than the future of freedom in the Middle East. Yet, as daunting as it may seem in light of recent developments, there really is no other path than the freedom agenda as far as U.S. policy should be concerned. After the Arab Spring, the U.S.-led order in the region is frayed, but it still stands. If it is to persist and thrive, that order must be decoupled from classical Arab authoritarianism.

Our liberal allies in this fight are deeply flawed. Disengaging from the region and adopting a “humble” posture, however, will only leave them more vulnerable to the Islamists—and to their own worst urges. As a number of writers have already suggested, the Middle East today is desperately in need of an ideological plan similar to the Marshall Plan deployed in postwar Europe. But to make the investment worth its while, the United States should not hesitate to assume the role of the democratic teacher, as it did in Europe, to shape and articulate a Middle East liberalism that is at peace with Israel, that refrains from anti-Western rhetoric and prioritizes individual and minority rights over the whims of demagogic mobs. There is no other cure for the Algiers syndrome.

Sohrab Ahmari is an Iranian-American journalist and nonresident associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He is also co-editor of Arab Spring Dreams, a new anthology of essays by young Mideast dissidents (Palgrave Macmillan). H/T John Podhoretz.

The Global War on Christians

I know, time is precious, but please take an hour and a half to watch the video (see below) of a talk given by John L. Allen, Jr., at the recent Los Angeles Religious Education Congress 2012 on the global war on Christians. A senior correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter and a vaticanologist of CNN and NPR, John L. Allen, Jr. carefully explains—on the basis of facts and evidence, not opinions—that what is at stake today for Christians worldwide is nothing less than their own survival. Yes, Christians are the most persecuted group in the contemporary world. (Via The Metaphysical Peregrine)

Arab Spring or Islamist Winter?

Protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo, in Habib Bourguib Av. in Tunis, in Sana'a, Yemen, and in Douma, Syria. - Picture: Wikimedia Commons

Michael J. Totten in the January/February issue of World Affairs:

The phrase “Arab Spring” is a misnomer. The political upheavals sweeping Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria are concurrent yet different phenomena, and it’s premature to assume that any of them, let alone all of them, will bring their respective countries out of the long Arab winter of authoritarian rule. In the medium term, the number of genuinely liberal democracies to emerge in the Arab world is likely to be one or zero.
I’ve been to all three countries that overthrew tyrants last year—Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya—and I rented an apartment in Lebanon while the government of Syria, which may well become fourth on the list, waged a murder and intimidation campaign against Lebanese journalists and elected officials. The only things these countries have in common with each other is that they’re in turmoil and that they are Arab.

Take Tunisia and Egypt:

Large parts of Tunisia appear so “Westernized,” at least on the surface, that visitors might think they’re in Greece or even in France if they didn’t know better. Egypt is an ancient and crushingly poor nation ruled, as it has been more often than not, by a military dictatorship.[…]
Most Tunisian women in the cities eschew the headscarf and dress like Europeans. Alcohol is widely available and consumed more by locals than tourists. The economy is almost as advanced as those of southern Europe, and large parts of the cities actually look like southern Europe. The Mediterranean is a recognizable place despite the civilizational boundary that separates its northern and southern shores. Tunis, on the coast, has more in common with Provence than with its own Saharan interior. And its vineyards produce wine that is almost as fine.
Imperial France left a powerful imprint on Tunisia’s cultural DNA, as did Rome long ago. “The explanation for Tunisia’s success,” Robert Kaplan wrote in the Atlantic in 2001, “begins with the fact that modern Tunisia corresponds roughly to the borders of ancient Carthage and of the Roman province that replaced it in 146 B.C., after a third and final war between the two powers. ‘Africa,’ originally a Roman term, meant Tunisia long before it meant anything else.” This little wedge of a country in central North Africa has been at least partially oriented northward for most of its history ever since.
[…]
Egypt is, in so many ways, the anti-Tunisia. Almost every woman who goes out in public wears a headscarf. I see more men in just one single day with bruised foreheads—acquired by hitting their heads on the floor during prayer—than I have seen in all other Muslim-majority countries combined in almost a decade. The country is, as far as I can tell, the most Islamicized place in the world after Saudi Arabia. It used to be oriented more toward the Mediterranean, as Tunisia still is, but that was more than a half century ago.
Cairo was once a must-see city like Paris and Rome and Vienna, but today it’s a crowded, polluted, and grinding third-world megacity animated by reactionary and authoritarian politics. Its liberal epoch is over.

Libya and Syria, in turn, have their own peculiarities. But what do these four countries have in common? In the Middle East almost all secular governments have failed spectacularly in the modern era. As a result, Radical Islam looks good on paper to millions... The full article is worth a read.

Burning for Freedom in Tibet

“No people should be forced to live in such desperate circumstances that they feel they must resort to desperate means like suicide,” writes the Christian Science Monitor commenting the tragic type of protest that has become popular in two different parts of the world in the past two years. The kind of protest in question is setting fire to oneself, and the two different parts of the world that the CSM is referring to are Tibet and some countries of the Arab world. Perhaps the major difference (among many others) between the two cases is that, generally speaking, as far as I know, what is happening in Tibet doesn’t seem to deserve being noticed, or at least it is not getting the coverage it deserves. With very few exceptions like this or this:

Another Tibetan in southwest China self-immolated Saturday in the latest in a series of apparent protests against Chinese rule, activist groups said.
The self-immolation in the town of Aba in Sichuan province was followed by clashes between security forces and local Tibetans, said the London-based group Free Tibet.t protests against Chinese rule, activist groups said.
At least 16 Buddhist monks, nuns and other Tibetans are now believed to have set themselves on fire in the past year — including four in the past week — mostly in traditionally Tibetan areas of Sichuan province. Most have chanted for Tibetan freedom and the return of their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

Yes, we are talking of Buddhist monks setting fire to themselves—of course in response to Beijing’s iron-fisted grip over Tibetan affairs—and this notwithstanding the fact that any form of suicide is widely seen as contrary to the teachings of their religion!

“You [the Chinese leadership] will never address the genuine grievances of Tibetans and restore stability in Tibet through violence and killing, the only way to resolve the Tibet issue and bring about lasting peace is by respecting the rights of the Tibetan people and through dialogue,” said Lobsang Sangay, the prime minister of Tibet’s government in exile in Dharamsala in India, who denounced the shooting by police on hundreds of Tibetan protesters in western Sichuan this week. Of course he is right, but at the same time it’s pretty easy to predict that, even though the Tibetans’ struggle for freedom will continue, whether the whole world is watching or not,

As the communist government in Beijing struggles with issues of reform and modernization, it has retained and even intensified its hard-line policies against the Tibetan people. Given China's growing importance as an economic power and a general sense of fatigue in the rest of the word for meaningful action in defense of human rights, the people in Tibet can expect little concrete support in their quest for political freedom and religious liberty.

Candlelight vigil in Dharmsala, India, after news reports of self-immolation by two Tibetan monks at the Kirti Monastery in Sichuan province's Aba prefectuture, Monday, Sept. 26, 2011. Pic:AP

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens died Thursday night at 62. Journalist, essayist, and one of England’s most celebrated, yet controversial  polemicists, he waged countless battles on behalf of causes left and right. The following excerpt from the full interview with him by Richard Dawkins in the New Statesman, that was trailed a few days ago, is  perhaps the most effective portrait of him—it is not yet online and I’m quoting from Norman Geras’ blog. And yes, along with Norm and many others, I will miss him.

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian - on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy - the one that's absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

That has secular forms, with gurus and dictators, of course, but it's essentially the same. There have been some thinkers - Orwell is pre-eminent - who understood that, unfortunately, there is innate in humans a strong tendency to worship, to become abject. So we're not just fighting the dictators. We're criticising our fellow humans for trying to short-cut, to make their lives simpler, by surrendering and saying, "[If] you offer me bliss, of course I'm going to give up some of my mental freedom for that." We say it's a false bargain: you'll get nothing. You're a fool.

Saudi Women: No More Naked 'Tempting' Eyes?

Okay, let’s suppose they pull it off and that the Orwellian entitled “Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” succeed in getting their claim approved, namely that they have the right to stop women revealing attractive and particularly “tempting” eyes in public, well, do you think their problems will magically fade away? If you think so you are wrong. Read this—especially the last paragraph!—to find out why:

Are we to assume that there will be guidelines set on which eyes are deemed the most alluring? And will the thousands employed by the committee to ensure Islamic laws are upheld get the job of deciding which eyes are sexy and which aren’t?
It could lead to all sorts of trouble, this. Those poor men landed with the job of gazing into all those sexy, lash-framed pools; how will they stop themselves from being overcome with lust?
And what about the poor women whose eyes aren’t deemed sexy? They could be well offended.
Can’t they see that the only reason eyes become extra seductive is because everything else is covered up?
If Saudi men cannot resist a pretty pair of eyes, why don’t they get the veils?

H/T: Il Mango

Game Over

The first photo (France Press/Philippe Desmazes)

Captured or killed, but the game is over aniway.

Occupy Goes Global (and Violent, Too)

See also here, here, and here.

However, what do “protests and riots in Rome” really mean? Well, here is the answer (from Fr. Philip Neri Powell, the best “foreign correspondent” in Italy). Simply priceless.

The Arab Spring Hasn’t Yet Begun

The winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2011, Boualem Sansal, is an Algerian engineer, an internationally acclaimed author, and a straightforward man. “Our choice this year”—said Gottfried Honnefelder, chairman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, at the start of the 2011 Buchtage Berlin (Berlin Book Days)—“is intended as a signal of encouragement for democracy movements in North Africa.” Yet, Boualem Sansal is not, as one might first think, a supporter of the Arab Spring, and this for the simple reason that, in his opinion, unfortunately the Arab Spring hasn’t yet begun. Here is what he told the Italian Corriere della Sera newspaper (English translation: mine):

The Arab Spring hasn’t yet begun. The big problems are still unsettled. It’s not only about dictators, who of course must disappear. No, there is also the question of culture and that of Islamism.
[...]
In studying the Third Reich, I saw that, over there, there were the same ingredients that I recognize in my own country and in the other Arab regimes. And they are: single-party system, militarization of the country, brainwashing, falsification of history, assertion of the existence of a conspiracy (the main culprits are Israel and America), glorification of the martyrs and of the supreme leader of the country, omnipresence of the police, huge mass meeting, pharaonic public works projects. When, and only when, Algerians, Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans will get rid of this castle of lies, then the Arab Spring will can start. That’s why I stay in Algeria.

The idea that we have to analyze National Socialism if we are to keep Islamism in check is not new, but what is surprising is that this time it comes from the other side of the fence, and the frankness with which it is expressed. Here is how he put it in a May 6, 2010 interview:

There are enormous similarities [between Nazis and Jihadists] - the concept of conquering: of souls, but also of territories. And there is the idea of extermination - of all those who do not submit to the ideology of Islamism.

But then again, Boualem Sansal is first and foremost the author of the first Arabic novel about the Holocaust, a book originally written in French—like the author’s other works—and published in the U.S. as The German Mujahid and in the U.K. as An Unfinished Business. It tells the story of a German nazi who goes into hiding after the war as a member of the Algerian forces fighting for independence from France. The German Mujahid was honored with multiple international prizes and translations but, as was to be expected, it was banned in Algeria, a country which, according to Sansal himself, is becoming a bastion of Islamic extremism and where the Holocaust is not currently acknowledged.

It has to be noted that, whilst Boualem Sansal publicly and sternly denounces the worldwide rise of Islamic extremism, the mood in the U.S. and other Western countries is generally so anti-anti-Islam that politicians run for cover whenever Islam is raised as an issue. Let’s hope the once-lonely fight of Boualem Sansal serves as an inspiration and a wake-up call.

The Peace Prize award ceremony will take place tomorrow, October 16, 2011 in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt.

The Day the Mouse Roared (and Other Sories)

Not Just the Daily Grind: Today’s Must Reads (or so)

1. Yesterday the parliament of Slovakia voted against the expansion of the euro bailout fund, but EU Pins Hopes on Second Slovak Vote This Week. The government of Iveta Radicova has fallen but will continue in a caretaker role. It has pledged to get the measure through parliament in a second vote.  Alas, in vain the mouse roared...
2. Danes firmly against euro - The latest Statistics Denmark euro barometer shows Danes firmly opposed to joining the Single Currency. Nothing new under the Danish Sun. They didn't want in before the financial crash, and a fortiori they don't want in right now. There is something right in Denmark.
3. Italy Still Needs Silvio Berlusconi - Over at the National Review they think there's still hope for il Cavaliere. When the night is darkest the dawn is nearest...
   
4. The Académie française: custodians of the French language - The Académie française was created in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu. Its aim was to "fix the French language, giving it rules, rendering it pure and comprehensible by all."
   
   

   Each French ministry has its own commission of terminology and neologisms, whose job is to track down English terms and offer French alternatives. They send their proposals to the Académie, which debates the new terms and rubber stamps them.
   Once published in the statues book, French civil servants are urged to use them. Its rulings, however, are only advisory; not binding on either the public or the government. About 300 such official French terms appear each year.
   However, not all catch on. The French term "prix hypotécaire à risqué" is not often heard in place of "subprime", for example.

   
   
5. Saudi Women Receive Husbands' Explicit Permission To Celebrate Right To Vote -
   
   

   In the wake of the watershed decision granting them the right to vote in the 2015 elections, Saudi women have received their husbands' explicit consent to rejoice, sources reported Wednesday. "It is with great pride that women all across Saudi Arabia have been allowed to leave their homes under the guardianship of a male relative and celebrate this cultural landmark," father of four Khalid al-Kazaz told reporters. "It brings us great pleasure to permit them a few moments in which to smile beneath their hijabs before returning to their daily duties." Saudi officials followed the announcement with another historic decree that lowered from 10 to 7 the number of lashes that will be administered to women who drive themselves to the voting booth.

   
   No further comment needed, right?
   

Not Just the Weekly Grind: Last Week’s Roundup

1. Notes on Perry - “I think Perry is undervalued at this point…” Well, so do I, to be honest. And as a matter of fact (see below)...
2. GOP Primary News And Notes - “Rick Perry may have had a less than stellar roll out with voters but he’s rolling in the dough.” Yeah, as the old saying goes (and with all due respect), “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”
   
3. Employment in Italy -
   “Italy’s official statistics office ISTAT releases figures on employment and unemployment levels [...]. The figures reveal that there are anomalies concerning unemployment levels in Italy’s south.” Well, it’s actually quite surprising that there are only two anomalies... 
4. Tea Party Activist Gets Help from Morgan Freeman’s Neighbors -
   Ali Akbar, a Tea Party activist who sent a letter to Morgan Freeman inviting him to a Tea Party told Roger Simon that Freeman’s Mississippi neighbors would attempt to deliver the letter personally. Freeman, as many will recall, accused the Tea Party of racisim... “My evaluation of Akbar,” says Roger Simon, “is that he is quite determined to reach Freeman and get some response from the actor to his invitation.” Bloody hell, it might turn out to be a damn good fight!
5. Thirty Three Things (v. 55) - Issues and problems such as Holden Caulfield’s immortal question about where the ducks from the Central Park pond go in winter, but not only this. Some examples: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? What would really happen if you nuked a volcano? Famous Quotes That Were Never Said, The Dead Sea Scrolls Are Online In High-Definition, Unusual Ways to Die Through the Ages, etc.